osprey_archer | Book Review: How to Cook and Eat in Chinese

You know how it is with modern daughters and mothers who think we are modern. And it is even more delicate with a mother and a daughter, both having had mixed experiences of eating, cooking, speaking, and writing. Now that we have not neglected to do the making-up with each other after our last recipe, it is safe for me to claim that all the credit for the good points of the book are mine and all the blame for the bad points is Rulan’s.

Next, I must blame my husband for all the negative contributions he has made toward the making of the book. In many places he has changed Rulan’s good English into bad, which he thinks Americans like better…

Like Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was translated into English by a family member: in this case, her daughter Rulan, with occasional footnotes by Yuenren Chao (who once has dueling footnotes with Rulan). The book is part traditional cookbook, with recipes, but also partly a description of Chinese food culture in the early to mid twentieth century. (The book was published in 1945. For obvious reasons, the Chaos had been stuck in America for a few years at that point.)

Chao mentions, for instance, that although it’s common in China to serve tea throughout the day, no tea is served at meals. In fact, often the only liquid at meals is soup, and people will take spoonfuls of soup to refresh themselves between courses. There’s no dessert at the end of the meal, but at a banquet, sweets may appear at intervals between other courses; the other main use of sweets in Chinese cuisine is as tien-hsin, “dot-hearts,” (tim-sam in Cantonese), which are little meals/snacks eaten with tea - although these are just as likely to be savory, “flour things which are baked, fried, or boiled and may be made sweet or salty.”

I loved the translation “dot-hearts” and wish it had caught on in English; it sounds so much more elegant than “snack.” I also loved the phrase Chao mentions as a description of fine food, “mountain rarities and sea flavors.” Isn’t that so evocative?

In many cases Buwei and Rulan are not just translating from Chinese into English but actually making up an English word or phrase to correspond to the original Chinese. Some of these caught on, like stir-fry (defined as “a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up material with wet seasoning”); others didn’t, like wraplings for what I believe, based on the description and the line-drawings, English-speakers now call dumplings.

She does have a dumpling recipe - for a New Year Dumpling that is made by concocting a nut stuffing (ground walnut & almond, & sesame), sprinkling the balls of stuffing with water, and then rolling them till coated in glutinous rice flour and then sprinkling then coating etc etc until there are four or five layers of rice flour, and then you boil the whole thing up. If you google New Year Dumpling today, something completely different comes up! Is this because New Year Dumplings have completely changed direction in China, or because the dish Chao describes now goes by a different name in English?

As it’s a cookbook rather than a memoir, it has less forward motion than Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, so I found it a little harder to get into - but the process of translating from one language into another that doesn’t yet have a word or set phrase for the things you’re describing really intrigued me. And the food descriptions kept making me hungry!

Book Review: How to Cook and Eat in Chinese

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